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Martha Graham Dance Company: Clytemnestra / Skirball Center, New York University, NYC / May 12, 15, and 16, 2009

Genius though she was–as a dancer, as a choreographer, and as the inventor of the only Western dance technique apart from classical ballet capable of training a dancer fully to professional capability–Martha Graham produced more than her share of weak, empty works, some of which even qualify as unintentional self-parody. There’s no question, though, that a cluster of her finest efforts belongs to what is known as her “Greek Cycle.”

Any susceptible dancegoer who has seen Cave of the Heart (1946), sprung from the myth of Medea and Jason; Errand into the Maze (1947), a gloss on the Ariadne and Theseus tale; or Night Journey (1947), which retells the Jocasta and Oedipus tragedy–when these works are rightly performed–knows he is looking at the soul laid bare. (Mentioning Graham’s rendition of these couples’ stories, I put the woman’s name first, because Graham saw human experience from a woman’s point of view–in other words, hers.)

This season, the Graham company, which has long known troubles almost worthy of the Greek myths, and is now led by Janet Eilber, has brought Graham’s recently revived 1958 Clytemnestra to New York. Derived from Aeschylus’s Oresteia and given a flashback-and fragmented treatment of time, the piece was a must-see at its creation, yet has been absent from the repertory since 1994.

Preview announcements for the troupe’s May 12-16 engagement at NYU’s Skirball Center (during which the piece was shown three times) as well as reviews from out of town, repeatedly described the work as the acme of Graham’s Greek-related dances. Why? Because it’s program-length, while the others I mentioned are succinct enough to be performed with two other works? Because its ruthlessness is positively gaudy? Many of the seven deadlies are covered and, Lord knows, the blood does flow, but violence, though it may contribute to grandeur–see The Iliad and The Song of Roland, literature that made me, a pacifist, understand the heroism and glory embedded in war–is not necessarily its equivalent. No, Clytemnestra can’t claim to be among Graham’s greatest Greek ventures; it’s simply a helluva melodrama, filled with extremes of action, but short on depth, texture, and subtlety of emotion.

The company calls its present production a reconstruction. What does that mean? It usually means that the dance in question is recalled and remounted by means of first-hand evidence: memories of the people on whom it was made; dance notation scores; film or video of its premiere or early showings; still photographs; notes penciled into the score as aide-mémoires by the work’s original rehearsal pianist; eye-witness accounts of early performances. Of course you see that these sources are listed in order of diminishing reliability, that they are incomplete and often shaky; and that, as time passed, the choreographer herself may have made changes in the dance.

So what have we got in the case of the present Clytemnestra? Something close to the original, claims Eilber, who had advisors that included company veteran Linda Hodes; a version that runs two and a half hours as it did when the dance was first created, compared, by radical example, to the 90-minute show shortened for a Dance in America telecast in the late 70s; the original costumes designed by Graham and dancer Helen McGehee, in place of the Halston outfits imposed upon the piece at one point; the original score by Halim El-Dabh, rife with voiced exclamations like “A mother’s curse!”; the semi-abstract sculptural set created by Isamu Noguchi, whose innovations for earlier and far greater Graham works (among them Frontier; Seraphic Dialogue, and Cave of the Heart) are legendary, but who, for Clytemnestra, just feebly quoted himself.

The choreography reveals Graham quoting herself, too, with moves that are gorgeous–huge strides, with the heels pounding the floor like muffled blows; slow, fluid back falls that require thighs of iron and a snake-supple spine; hands rigidly cupped or emphatically striking the body. These were radical when Graham invented them years before, but cannot astonish here because she appears to be repeating them merely by rote, without the context that would make them fully expressive.

Expression is, indeed, the main issue here. On opening night in New York, it was obvious that the dancers had been rehearsed within an inch of their lives. Now they need to loosen up and, stylized and formal though the choreography is, allow themselves to look like individual people, each one in the throes of his or her particular passion. A few have already achieved this: Maurizio Nardi as Aegisthus, primarily, and also Blakeley White-McGuire as Cassandra and Lloyd Knight as Paris. Nearly all of the others, technically magnificent, I grant you, are working as if they were aiming for a perfect score on the SATs. The Furies–a small chorus of women in black–move in a unison so precise, they look like the Rockettes.

The big disappointment was Fang-Yi Sheu, for several years thought to come close in power and expression to Graham herself. Her incarnation of Clytemnestra shows that, wonderful as she is, this was never really so–that she lacks the seething passion that gave Graham’s dancing its incontrovertible conviction and edge. As the tempestuous queen, Sheu is simply too weak in the departments of rage and lust, to say nothing of sheer athletic power. (Granted, a serious injury incurred a few years back may be responsible for this last.)

One of Eilber’s “bright ideas” to make the dance accessible to the present-day audience involves small changes in the choreography. These are a mistake, unworthy of Graham’s stern and vivid aesthetic, and should be dispatched to Hades immediately. Another is the addition of supertitles explaining who’s who and what they’re about at the moment. These should be unnecessary if the audience can be persuaded to read the program notes. The titles are tackily executed both physically and content-wise (the silly “Clytemnestra dwells on all that has happened,” for instance) and inevitably suggest dumbing down. What ‘s more they’re interspersed with signage like “Pause. 2 minutes,” which leads you to expect “Restrooms to the left. Canteen to the right.”

But the really grave problem with these ostensibly helpful messages is that they point out all too pertinently the fact that the dance itself doesn’t tell you what you need to know. I’m reminded of a long-ago colleague who, confronting performances of early postmodernism, forbid himself to read any program notes until he was returning home on the subway. Invariably, beneath the rattle and screech of the clattering train, he’d find himself exclaiming sotto voce, “Oh, so that’s what it was about!”

Despite my cavils, I’m very glad Clytemnestra is back in the repertory. When a dance is absent, it is soon forgotten. Present, it’s there for the rising generation to learn and interpret. As for the current cast, I am fairly confident that, with ongoing performances, the dancers will make it their own.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Trisha Brown Dance Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, NYC / April 29 – May 2, 2009

Trisha Brown, recently back at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, offered a show that indicates how she’s moved from her beginnings to today, in a career that spans five decades.

One of the most wonderful aspects of her early work was its plainness. If the Shakers had had progeny, they might have been her ancestors. In the 1960s, Brown was a hero of postmodernism, as it came to be called, rejecting traditional concert-dance accoutrements, such as plot, emotion, musical accompaniment, decor, and costumes other than the sort of threads in which you washed the car. Quiet, smart as hell, witty, and determined, she had people walking down the facades of buildings, with the gawkiness of entry-level mountain climbers in reverse; communicating movements to one another from Soho rooftops (as if in a visual game of Telephone); making ordinary, often pointless tasks–like picking up a pile of sticks, one at a time, from a spot on the floor and moving them to a similar nondescript heap just several feet away–somehow thrilling.) Without ever indulging in self-congratulatory fuss about it, she embodied the shock of the new.

The 1968 Planes, the oldest work on the BAM program, looked back to these plainspoken dances, though it augments bare-bones movement with hyperactive film that jazzes up and, indeed, almost overwhelms the main, live action. (It also incorporates some music by Simone Forti, a fellow revolutionary.) This is the deal: a pale rectangular wall stands center stage. Pierced regularly by circles, it offers foot- and handholds to three women in jump suits, who ascend, descend, and travel slowly across it at a serene pace, with no destination indicated. The film starts out as a shaky, handheld camera-style view of urban detail animated by frenetic lighting, moves on to add color, and eventually becomes a travelogue of exotic lands. From time to time a pretty young woman in a pink leotard that nearly matches her skin, magnified way beyond life size compared to the live performers, straddles the space and performs supple back bends. Is she a latter-day Terpsichore?

Gradually embracing the elements that add conventional grandeur to dance, Brown moved toward opera-house acceptance, consistently doing so on her own terms. O złożony / O composite (the second element of the title is the French translation of the Polish first part) was created in 2004 for three étoiles of the Paris Opera Ballet (the French adore Brown). It was these top stars–Aurélie Dupont, Manuel Legris, and Nicolas Le Riche–who performed the piece at BAM in its American premiere. While the choreography is far from being top-notch, it was a pleasure to see how these mature ballet-made bodies absorbed the fluid style of the movement Brown gave them, while she in turn, who never studied classical dance, allowed them occasional steps from the technique they had perfected from childhood.

The best (and key) passage in the dance occurs early on and closes the piece as well. The two men face each other and walk softly with the woman’s body held horizontally between them. Her body hides their supporting hands, so she seems to float. The balance of the dance, although each of the participants is given a little solo, is essentially an exploration of how delicately and intricately a physical ménage à trois can be managed. The territory might have been Ashton’s, and he would have made it more tender and far easier to understand.

Brown’s dance is accompanied by a meditatively melancholy score that Laurie Anderson based on poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Czeslaw Milosz and is danced before Vija Celmins’s irresistible backdrop of a nearly black sky thick with stars (that is, étoiles).

The glory of the program was the 1979 Glacial Decoy, one of Brown’s perfect collaborations with the late visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. Against a huge four-panel slide show of black and white Rauschenberg photographs of commonplace things, mostly rural, whose interest and beauty so often goes unnoticed, five women flitter back and forth along a cross-stage path that seems, on both sides, to go on into the wings where the audience can no longer see it. If that’s not a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.

Rauschenberg costumed the women–angels? fairies? visions?–in filmy white nightgown-like dresses with dropped sleeves that fan out like little parasols, leaving the dancers’ fine-boned shoulders bare. So what you see is a sculptural mass of uninterrupted flesh–head, neck, and shoulders–that proclaims warmth and vitality, while the rest of the body is cocooned in a cool scudding cloud.

There is no sound other than the ambient hum that makes a room come alive and the dancers’ often emphatic footfalls. No other sound is needed.

In the world premiere slot in the program was L’Amour au théâtre (Love in the Theater) set to excerpts from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie, based on Racine’s tragic Phèdre. Brown is slated to stage the full opera in France in 2010, and the choreography we saw will be dropped into that production in segments. The opera itself is rife with melodramatic situations, dense with strong human feeling. It’s hard to say how Brown will fare with this vehement work and its violent passions. She has certainly progressed in her investigation of complex human relationships between O złożony and L’Amour au théâtre, and the segments we saw bunched into a whole in the latter will register more sharply when they’re separated. Still, even this latest material leaves Brown needing to invent choreography that makes it clear that erotic love is not a merely a matter of tangling arms and legs, no matter how intricate.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Merce Cunningham Dance Company: Nearly Ninety / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, NYC / April 16 – 19, 2009

Yesterday, April 16th, was Merce Cunningham’s 90th birthday. Long may he wave! The event was celebrated at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House with the world premiere of his new full-evening piece, Nearly Ninety.

It’s only natural that the viewer would attribute a futuristic mindset to the piece–exploring space, because of the scenery, and a subtextual reminder of the Heaven that awaits the choreography sooner than later. But, oddly, the work has a dated effect. The most arresting element of Nearly Ninety, the decor, is dominated by Benedetta Tagliabue’s huge, handsome, changing construction which, in its progressive incarnations, suggests a spaceship. It’s skeletal, though, and the figures moving within it–seen more clearly as the lighting gradually brightens–are not technicians preparing for lift-off but the musicians creating their eerie, often cacophonic sound. The glamour of space travel, however, wore thin decades ago.

The abstract choreography itself–created simultaneously but not collaboratively with the music (this time by John Paul Jones, Takehisa Kosugi, and Sonic Youth: Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley)–seemed typically Cunninghamesque, with its familiar off-kilter partnered balances, its cousinly relationship to classical ballet with the dissimilarities thought-provokingly apparent, the sudden exits of the dancers as if they were birds taking flight at the least hint of fear or finding a new focus of interest in a territory unseen by the audience.

In Nearly Ninety, though, the dance vocabulary suddenly appears limited. Take away the myriad attenuated arabesques, for instance, and where would it be? It also seems to have lost some of its signature sharpness–in the long leaps and the flickering footwork particularly. Strangest of all is the lack of relationship between the “spaceship” and the dancers. They just go on doing their stuff in the downstage space left by its looming presence until the very end, when a fragile young woman enters it and, on a small high platform projecting from it, moves in attitudes that suggest a heroic action is about to occur. She looks like she’s going to throw herself from the edge, her plunge to be broken, if she’s lucky, by her fellow dancers.

Cunningham’s immune to melodrama of that cheap sort, but the lengthy build-up leads to mere insignificance: nothing more than her quietly backing off and unobtrusively descending a sturdy staircase to solid ground and safety.

The performance had an onstage coda about which we were warned and asked to stay for in the single intermission. Arranged in a cross-stage line, the usual suspects made small speeches about Cunningham’s enduring wonderfulness and the silent dancers did little pliés and foot stretches to help their recently hard-worked bodies endure the longueurs of standing still and looking benign. In the center of this display sat its raison d’être, in a wheelchair that, with him in it, became a throne, his all-black clothes topped with a shiny jet smoking jacket that suggested “magician,” playing his role with understated, perfect-mannered elegance. He received no awards, common to such occasions, probably because he has all of them already–and has surely earned them by repeatedly giving us, down the decades, “something to see,” in his own words, “that [we] hadn’t seen before.”

This accomplished, the rich and famous went to a party held in a tent across the street from the theater and the rest of us found the half-renovated Atlantic Avenue subway station and went home.

A curiosity: the dancers were dressed, by Romeo Gigli, in glossy black and white unitards that changed slightly in the course of the piece for no reason I could see except to keep viewers from getting bored. But why, I kept wondering, did the initial costumes have one black sleeve that ended in a glove, conjuring up memories of Balanchine’s La Valse and other ballets of the French surreal persuasion? The conceit mates weirdly with bare feet.

A mistake? At the end of this season, Cunningham will not renew the contracts of three of his senior dancers–Holley Farmer, Koji Mizuta, and Daniel Squire–for artistic reasons, it was announced. At first people assumed this was a money-saving device imperative in these perilous economic times, since the seniors command the highest salaries. Then commentators surmised it was because the choreographer takes his greatest pleasure in exploring what younger, unformed dancers might achieve. As far as I’m concerned, letting Farmer go was dead wrong. She humanizes Cunningham’s material with an erotic element it benefits from greatly. Farmer is expressive in a technique that deliberately ignores expressiveness. Cunningham danced with Martha Graham early in his stage career and probably had quite enough of that and the excesses it can lead to. But I’d suggest, respectfully, that one shouldn’t turn one’s back too adamantly on one’s past.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Juilliard Dances Repertory / Peter Jay Sharp Theater, NYC / March 25-29, 2009

Consider what I’ll call the minor leagues of dance performance–the shows put on by the best schools and junior companies honing advanced-level students who are talented; absurdly young, considering the skills they’ve developed; thoroughly rehearsed and coached; still ingenuous enough to lay their lives on the line for these events so essential to their upcoming careers as full-fledged professionals. Of the groups in New York alone, think ABT II, Ailey II, Taylor 2 (these first three have a busy touring life), the New York City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet, and the group from Juilliard that I saw just the other day in a program named Juilliard Dances Repertory. The showings produced by these institutions turn out to be not minor league at all and not merely showcases of the stars of the future, but usually very satisfying dance events in themselves.

Mark Morris’s GloriaPhoto: Rosalie O’Connor

The Juilliard program opened with Mark Morris’s Gloria (1981; revised 1984) to the eponymous Vivaldi score, staged by Megan Williams, an unforgettable Morris alum. Back in ’81, I saw the premiere and was duly astonished by the genius of the work that illuminated the old Dance Theater Workshop auditorium, then a grungy black hole of a theater. Without any arty posturing, the choreography evoked the idea of humankind’s capacity, despite its physically and spiritually crippled aspects, to aspire to glory. It conveyed its subject in such pared-down yet infinitely inventive ways, with such insightful musicality and command of structure, it looked as if Morris had reinvented dancing. Nearly three decades later, that startling newness hasn’t worn away.

Of course the Juilliard dancers were at a certain disadvantage. The piece wasn’t created on them; they lack the extreme diversity of body type and the strong and varied stage personalities that derive from that, so important to the early Morris ensemble. They also have the air of trying to live up to a model they’ve never seen. All this is inevitable in such a situation but, despite it, they were fearless and beautiful.

In a signature image, they ran at daring speed to crash to the floor, prone, with such force they skidded forward and then propelled themselves on their arms alone, dragging the rest of their now-inert body, and, a moment later, stood exultantly erect, arms reaching for the heavens, fingers waving with the adolescent exuberance of cheerleaders shaking their pompoms for their team or, just perhaps, for the greater glory of God. They had grasped a secret Morris has continued to examine, in myriad ways, throughout his career: the fact that the plebian and the sacred are one.

Lar Lubovitch’s North StarPhoto: Rosalie O’Connor

Lar Lubovitch’s 1978 North Star, to Philip Glass music, is the most telling example of this choreographer’s treating a bevy of bodies as a single, magically fluent organism. Dancers clad in loose black garments cling loosely to one another on a night-dark stage, illuminated only by slim shafts of down-light. They join as a group, then as two quartets, to waft fluently like seaweed in an ocean that can turn turbulent or tender. A vehemently spasmodic solo–seemingly for a prophetess destined, ominously, to be ignored or scorned–punctuates the pacific mood for no discernable reason, but it balances the piece with some welcome rootedness and weight.

North Star was very well staged by Peggy Baker and John Dayger; the Juilliard dancers did them proud. In an age when “edginess” and inscrutability reign in dance, it must be a treat for them to be simply, liquidly, romantically lyrical.

Twyla Tharp’s The FuguePhoto: Rosalie O’Connor

Twyla Tharp’s original company was all female, and the tough-spoken choreographer ironically referred to the group as “a bunch of broads doing god’s work.” Her 1970 The Fugue was originally choreographed for three of these women (Tharp, Sara Rudner, and Rose Marie Wright); today it is often given to a trio of men. The Juilliard performances, staged by former Tharp dancers Jennifer Way and Tom Rawe, alternated the genders on alternate evenings.

I got to see the guy version, which I’ve always found somewhat disappointing, because it lacks the thrill of women attacking material that is as tough and emphatic physically as it is mentally. (This material consists of 20 intricately manipulated variations on a 20-count theme. The Fugue has no score beyond the percussive beat of the feet in heavy-heeled shoes on the electronically amplified stage.) The Juilliard men, especially, were too tempered and even-toned; lacking the deadpan ferocity the choreography requires. The men wore workaday shirts and trousers, but I recall the original Tharp femmes as more exotic in black garb and calf-high leather boots that meant business.

Still the dance is a marvel. You can almost hear Tharp’s brain ticking away while her sense of theater gives the brilliantly engineered material color and excitement.

Only the final number on the program was a mistake. Batsheva Dance Company’s director Ohad Naharin’s From MAX and THREE (excerpts with a bit of reworking from two of his earlier pieces, plus a section in which the dancers lined up to take their turns performing unimpressive party tricks) was hardly a “premiere,” as it was advertised, from this Juilliard alum. It seemed to exist just to put a very large number of dancers on stage, perhaps charitably to use students who didn’t get to be in the other pieces. Well and good, I suppose, but Naharin missed the opportunity to do something authentically spectacular with this crowd. The performers just looked crowded, underemployed, and in some cases, perhaps with the least experienced, at a loss to know what they were supposed to aim for.

Still, three significant pieces out of four is more than most professional companies offer at a single repertory performance in these tarnished times. As for the Juilliard students’ freshness and eagerness to get things right, these qualities should be bottled and sold as an elixir.

© 2009 Tobi Tobias

Paul Taylor Dance Company / New York City Center, New York City / February 25 – March 15, 2009

Michael Trusnovec in Taylor’s Beloved Renegade. Photo by Wiley Price.
As the ambitious season ran on, displaying choices from five decades of Taylor works, it became more and more obvious that this dance-maker’s genius, his range, and his appetite for new territory are extraordinary, as is his ability to conjure up the most diverse moods and feelings from a dance vocabulary he has not found it necessary to revise or augment much over the years.
The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on March 13, 2009. To read it, click here.

Savion Glover: SoLo in TiME / Joyce Theater, New York City / March 3-22, 2009

Savion Glover. Photo by NiNA.
His feet are large–size 12 E or thereabouts–and, in their pedestrian mode, can look heavy and clumsy. Don’t kid yourself; they’re the fleetest human pedals imaginable. In quiet little soliloquies, the faster they get, the more crisply and delicately they strike the floor. When they slam down bluntly, full strength, you feel that the glass on the theater’s exit signs, luminous in the dark auditorium, is in danger of shattering.
The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on March 5, 2009. To read it, click here.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on March 6, 2009.

Dancers from the Paul Taylor Dance Company, from left, Michael Trusnovec, Julie Tice, and Orion Duckstein take part in a performance of “Beloved Renegade” in New York on Nov. 21, 2008. Performances continue through March 15, 2009 at New York’s City Center. Photographer: Wiley Price/Paul Taylor Dance Co. via Bloomberg News

March 6 (Bloomberg) — Illuminated by a narrow shaft of light, a man in white with pale coloring stands in a pure classical pose, as contemplative as a marble statue. A sheer dark scrim rises to reveal the people that have figured in his life, from youth to death, making him the man he is. Accompanied by Francis Poulenc’s “Gloria,” the ensuing events take on a sacred air.

Paul Taylor’s new “Beloved Renegade” was featured last Wednesday at the opening of his company’s three-week season at New York’s City Center. It’s a tribute to Walt Whitman, the American poet whose free-verse “Leaves of Grass” celebrated his feeling of oneness with everything in the world — people, grass, you name it.

The central figure, played with eloquence and restraint by Taylor’s muse, Michael Trusnovec, walks and watches as much as he dances. He observes various aspects of love: young people, whose innocent sensuality is their birthright, reveling in movement that is both tender and forceful, to a mound of dying soldiers, one of whom Trusnovec kisses tenderly on the mouth by way of a farewell blessing. (Whitman tended soldiers in the Civil War and was probably gay or bisexual.)

Old, Familiar Games

Trusnovec also watches the rollicking buoyancy of a quintet of children, still free of the world’s sorrows, at play in old, familiar games. He observes ecstatic adults celebrating love both as a community and as individual couples, as if the two forms of Eros were the same.

He witnesses the seemingly miraculous cure of a physically afflicted woman (Amy Young). Often the full ensemble members, simply dressed by Santo Loquasto in ice-cream colors, make gestures of worship and praise, emphasizing the idea that every aspect of life is holy.

The statuesque Laura Halzack plays Trusnovec’s guide and sometime dancing partner, though an emotional distance between them is scrupulously maintained. She is his guardian angel, eventually leading him to his inevitable death. Just before the curtain falls, the man we saw first poised in noble verticality lies supine and still, as if in his grave, while the woman rotates unwaveringly beside him, one leg extended high and curved, protecting him in life’s last passage.

Taylor came late to Whitman. Cottoning to the poet’s belief in the unity of body and soul — what choreographer wouldn’t? — he didn’t go off and write embarrassing imitative poems. Instead, nearing 80, Taylor has choreographed an homage to Whitman and the poet’s unconventional principles that is a masterwork only an artist of his mature experience could achieve. It needs only to be a little longer to be perfect. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting is already perfect.

Through March 15 at 131 W. 55th St. Information: +1-212- 581-1212; http://www.nycitycenter.org.

© 2009 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in the Culture section of Bloomberg News on February 26, 2009.

Dancers Eddie Taketa, left, and Natalie Desch perform in “Alchemy,” choreographed by Doug Varone, on Feb. 1, 2008. The dance piece, with music by Steve Reich, is being performed at New York’s Joyce Theater through March 1. Photographer: Phil Knott via Bloomberg News

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) — A delicately built woman with boyish curly hair stands before a backdrop suggesting a prison of impermeable rock. Her head remains unbowed, her fingers tremble like antennae receiving messages and her eyes are lifted to some indefinable world beyond that still contains hope.

Set to Steve Reich’s “Daniel Variations,” Doug Varone’s “Alchemy,” given its New York premiere Tuesday night at New York’s Joyce Theater, takes off from a pair of stories — one ancient, one modern — referred to in the score. In 2002 the Jewish-American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped by Islamist extremists in Pakistan and hideously murdered. The Daniel of the Old Testament maintains a steadfast faith in God despite life-threatening acts of violence against him; his tale is vivid with apocalyptic visions.

The frail-looking but unwavering woman (Erin Owen) appears to be an amalgam of both Daniels. Fellow captives join her: four men and three women who are repeatedly felled, physically and spiritually, by invisible oppressors who seem inhuman to a degree almost beyond imagination.

The victims never completely give up. They try to comfort one another, but there is no respite from their situation. They crawl along the floor, bodies contorted, struggle to rise only to fall again, flesh and bone thudding against the floor. On occasion they even turn upon one another, reduced to savage animals. Even the Daniel figure eventually succumbs, all hope extinguished.

Golden Glow

But then a golden glow shines down on the distorted, inert bodies. “Daniel” is the first to stand erect, raise her arms to the light, chest throbbing as if she’s received a definitive message about the essence of being fully human — to face the most terrible fates with one’s courage and identity intact. Slowly, her companions absorb it.

“Alchemy” is not, by a long shot, the most successful dance Varone has ever choreographed. The general theme suits his gifts but the parallel stories that inspired Reich don’t translate well into dance (or into music, for that matter). Varone’s attempt to make them work as a semi-abstract version of the haunting facts leaves too much vagueness in the air, which I suspect his fine dancers feel.

Nevertheless, Varone remains one of the most important choreographers on the scene. While not as well known as Paul Taylor, he operates in many genres: opera, spoken theater, the big and small screens — he may be the busiest choreographer in town.

At the same time, maintaining his own company, creating a repertory for this small group of quietly expressive dancers with unique stage personalities, remains the heart of his work. His pieces for them are typically poignant, often executed in subtly varied emotional shades of gray. They make the viewer feel: Yes, for good and ill, this is what life is like.

“Alchemy” is on a triple bill with the 2006 “Lux” to a Philip Glass score and a reworking of the 2000 “Tomorrow” to luscious Belle Epoque songs by Reynaldo Hahn.

Through March 1 at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Ave. Information: +1-212-242-0800; http://www.joyce.org.

© 2009 Bloomberg L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

New York City Ballet: Revival of Balanchine’s Swan Lake / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / February 12, 2009

Wendy Whelan of New York City Ballet in Balanchine’s Swan Lake. Photo by Paul Kolnik.
Wendy Whelan was magnificent as Odette. Her many admirers over her long career know that she was born to dance the quirkier, more angular roles in the modern ballet repertory–because of anatomy and perhaps temperament. As time passed, she grew softer and registered more emotion (very delicately). But her Odette is a triumph because she was not made for it nor it for her, and yet she looks as if she has minutely studied and absorbed the interpretations of her predecessors in a variety of distinctive productions and instinctively added some of her own touches. The result is everywhere beautifully executed, right in its intent and feeling, and in no way ballerina-ish, as if her experiences were something that could happen to any sensitive girl sufficiently romantic enough to wander by lakes at dusk.
The full article appeared in Voice of Dance (http://www.voiceofdance.org) on February 13, 2009. To read it, click here.